Who do you blame?

How many of you have wondered if you are walking in your parents footsteps.  How far are we to blame genetics ya know?  Sherrie told me something in an email that sort of hit me.  She told me that I'm way to young to be having this many problems, and what am I going to be like in twenty years, when I'm sixty.  I already know that I have way too many problems for my age.  But it made me look at my mom.  The past few months I've been bugging her to go to the doctors.  She already sees the doctor regularly since she has diabetes, high bp, high cholestrol, cardiomyopathy, etc.  When I look at her, she is 68 years old, not young.  I hate to say it, I wi**** was different, but she is way older than most people her age.  She can't drive anymore, she even bent down the other day in front of me and made a nose dive right into the ground.  She was very embarrassed, but her leg gave out on her and went numb.

This is where I'm heading.  Not only this, but even worse since I'm much more obese than she has ever been.

I've always thought I act like my mom in a lot of ways, but it just never hit me that I am becoming MOM!  How many of you have found yourselves leading into the same path?  Or have until you started eating healthy?  Our kids are so much more obese than even we were growing up.  How is this going to effect them if they act just like us!  I have it worse than my mom, now my kids are going to have it worse than me.  My gawed, if I am correct they are going to age extremely fast!!  How did we let this go so far??  It's obvious to us, but it just doesn't sink in our heads what we are doing to the "next generation".  

The statistics are against us as it is, we are making it so much harder on ourselves.  Anyone ever thought about this?

You made me think about something that I haven't thought about in a long time because my Mother passed several years ago.  When I was big, I was totally going down the same path of destruction as my Mother.  She had type two diabetes and was told to control it with diet.  To say that she completely ignored her doctors is an understatement!  She ate and drank at will and ended up having a massive stroke, her blood pressure was off of the charts.  By the time she was fifty, you name it, she had it. 

I was always a 'healthy' obese person, but once I started with the insulin resistance, it would have been all down hill from there.  Just as soon as I got the diagnosis I made sure that I did something about it before it turned to type two diabetes...no way in hell I was going to end up like my Mother.  Now I'm disgustingly healthy, but it was a long hard fought battle to get here. 

We may inherit our genes, but there are so many things we can do to fight them.  I found that the hardest part was fighting the way of eating that I inherited...it was like being born a heroin addict!

If we can just get it into our hearts that our old age is in our hands today, we'll thank ourselves when we are seventy and working out at the gym with the young'uns!

Mary

I found that the hardest part was fighting the way of eating that I inherited...it was like being born a heroin addict!

You said it!  I'm hoping I'll keep thinking about this, and realize it's now or never.  It makes me sick of what I've done too my kids.  It's so hard to make everyone in the household realize eating healthy is the way to go, while you fight it in your head yourself.  

I've been off plan for some time, luckily haven't gained, just still diddling with my same ol' ten pounds.  I've been enjoying the summer too much.  But my ailments keep reminding me I better do something again soon.  I'm feeling pretty icky.

It just really got to me for some reason today that maybe my gynecologist is right, maybe I will be in a wheel chair by the time I'm 60 if I don't do something now.  Lord knows my mom can't even go to two stores straight.  Lately she goes to sit down while I finish shopping!  Her feet have been swelling, she's losing her balance, you name it.  It's sort of scary for her and for me!  So many women her age are very active!! 

Sometimes I think this whole thing is useless.  I have it embreaded in my head about how "statistcis" are saying that it's pretty much useless.  Then I think of my dad on how he would put me down in certain ways and just reinforce it.  Guess I'm not giving myself a chance??  Guess I'm all sappy today since my daughter moved out last night.haha  I feel old today!! :)  And realizing things I've wanted to do are slipping away.  Heck, some days I wonder if I'll be able to breathe deeply by the end of the day!  Now that's sad.  Lol, guess I need to go to bed and wake up again tomorrow on the other side of the bed.hehe  But this is good to think about.  Especially since I haven't been even wanting to even think about dieting or eating healthy.  Why do we sometimes have to have something bad  happen in our life  to realize how short life is??  It's really a shame, and one I wish I can make my kids realize!! I'm really scared for my kids.  Three so far has my genes, and one is (the littlest) is obsessed with the scale!  Wonder whom she got that from.

Yes, I think about this stuff all the time.

I read recently where the current Gen X'ers will be the first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.  I blame the fast food industry and the entire processed foods industry for a large part of the problem.  Another factor:  each succeeding generation becomes less and less active (read that: lazy). 

My grandmother came to America on a boat from Italy in 1905, at the age of 18, by herself.  She went to work in a textile mill - back then the work week was 55 hours - 10 hours a day and 5 hours on Saturday.  She married a baker and she raised six children while working 55 hours a week.  They also took in boarders.  She did all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping and child care for the family and the boarders.  Sunday, after church, was spent doing laundry and ironing clothes.   I don't know how she did it.  She never complained and she worked in the mills until she was 65.  She lived to be 95.  She was never overweight.  Once or twice a year, she would eat in a restaurant for a special occasion.  She cooked all food from scratch - all whole foods.   My aunts are still alive today - one is 98, another 94 and the young one is 90. 

I guess the point is, back then, there were no fast food restaurants and processed foods.  Everyone cooked at home and for the most part, the cheaper foods were the healthiest.  There were few labor saving devices and no TV sets.  My grandparents never owned a car.  They walked everywhere or took a bus or used the Metro.  They walked to work, had jobs where they were on their feet all day and then when they came home at night, the worked some more - cooking and cleaning and taking care of household chores.   My grandmother never set foot in a gymnasium in her life and yet she was the fittest person I ever met. 

My internist asked me a probing question prior to my WLS back in 2006:  She asked,  "Have you ever wondered why you never see any old, fat people?" 

I know, the food industry has taken a toll on our bodies. I also read about the next generation being the youngest to die.  I truly believe it!   It's just a shame we don't realize how bad it is for us (or care****il we are older and addicted to the stuff.  In my household I was never taught how bad this stuff was for you.  Why?  Because growing up we never ate out!  So when I was in high school at lunch, after school, at night, every where I went there was fast food.  I ate it constantly without a second thought.  Sure I had it in my head that it was bad for me, as I'm sure all young kids.  But I don't think I knew what the outcome would be for me eating all this stuff every day.  In my head (and I'm sure lots of young) just think gaining weight!  They don't think about health issues, or dying early.  They just think of the extra five pounds it will put on them in the NEAR future.  I know this is how my teenagers think.

That is so cool about your grandma.  My grandma was sort of the same, but for her she was widowed very early with five kids. She busted her butt off working in restaurants night and day to keep the family together. We went there all the time, and I never remembered her eating out hardly at all.  She would eat the same thing every morning and lunch time.lol  Bran flakes for breakfast, and a single piece of pb toast for lunch.lol  Sometimes with some homemade jelly on it.  Every single day..I thought that was so strange.  But she also died at a fairly ripe ol' age.  She even babied her kids when they were fifty bringing them over dinners, being active in the church,  etc.  Only "old" women I've ever met that loved to actively fish and love wrestling!!haha  She was a cool grandma.

I took out some of my old dishes I had put away.  I ran into some Fire King dishware I had saved.  I LOVE these bowls!!  They are exactly what my grandma ate out of.  The bowls for instance are small, perfect enough for just a serving and not much more. I compare them with our regular dishes and cups and man have our dishes  grown!!  So it's not just the servings of food, but our china has grown too!  But I have found since I have taken them out, every  one in my house is fighting over using the "small little bowls".  They think they are cute and because of the handles.lol  Whatever works right??hehe  I'm going to invest in some more soon and start using them regularly.  A while back I bought some ziploc small bowls, also perfect size, but not as strong, but good for storage in the freezer when you want premeasured foods.  Ok...I'm rambling...lol, I just woke up.ha   

I

I don't think I can blame my parents, they are the healthy athletic type, along with my brother and sister, I'm the odd one out. But somewhere down the line maybe genetics has had a hand in making me the giant blob  I am today...But I think that it has more to do with how I process stress (eating) and that is a learned trait. I do wish someone would have positively interviened when I was young and taught me how unhealthy all the food I love is and what it does to a body. It might have helped.  If I could go back and talk some sense into me, it would be the me in 7th grade who would buy 10 candybars a day and have them all gone before school was out (to cope with the stress and humiliation I faced at school and home each day) I would get outside and play more often instead of sitting inside reading and feeling sorry for myself.  But thats the past, and now all I can do is try and change so in my next 30 years I can live a healthy, active, happy life.

Genetics are important - hey most of my career is in molecular biology - but in this case it's what we are eating - the volume of food and the type of food. We are not eating the way our grandparents and ancestors did. There are many places today such as Okinawa Japan where grandparents are burying their grandchildren who died from diseases such as diabetes which they never heard of when they were younger. The difference is that the parents and more so the grandchildren are eating our industrial diet whereas the grandparents always ate their traditional whole foods diet.

Mary was smart to lose her weight to avoid diabetes - that is a horrible disease because it wreaks havoc on the whole body. Type 2 diabetes used to be called Adult Onset because it was only an adult disease until recently; it can be reversed in most cases by diet alone if you are willing to make serious changes.

As for exercise, yes some of us (me included) don't get enough, but actually most people do. There is no way you can exercise enough to make up for the extra calories we ingest unless you are a world class Olympic athlete in training. It is the food. I've been reading a lot of history books lately, totally unrelated to diet and exercise, and I'm shocked at how little exercise our ancestors got. In many parts of the world, farmers worked hard for only short periods of time and when the food was running out and before planting they spent a lot of time sleeping in bed during the day to get through without expending a lot of energy until the next harvest when they would eat well again. This idea of adults running and jogging for exercise was unheard of until the 1960's and people back then were sometimes arrested because no sane adult would run in the streets!

It's the crack cocaine industrial food - simple as that. It lights up the same area of the brain as crack cocaine does in addicts when studied using MRI and other sophisticated techniques. The only way to break the addiction is to not eat any processed food at all - NONE.

My suggestions – read The China Study to learn what foods healthy people eat. This book was on the NYT best sellers list when it first came out. I borrow books from my library but you buy them anywhere you buy books.

Then read Dr. Kessler’s End of Overeating to see how bad the industrial food really is. Dr. Kessler was the head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and he describes how they layer fat into foods in a way that we can’t do that at home and then add artificial chemicals to make the food hyper palatable – so tasty that most of us find it addicting. In his book he says you have to stop eating it – 100% to try to break the addiction. Some of us can never eat this food again without problems. Others can eventually go back and eat a little bit – but just like an alcoholic or cocaine addict we are always liable to fall down the slippery slope again. He will help you see that you’re eating fat layered with fat followed by fat etc. This book is or was recently on the NYT best sellers list.

Finally, read Profit for Appetite by Michelle Simon to read how powerful and formidable the food manufacturers are to see what you are up against. All corporations are charged with making profit for their investors – there is no good or bad, moral or ethical or non-moral way – it’s all about profits. The people working for corporations may be good, decent people, but it’s their duty to keep profits flowing in or they lose their job and the investors can sue them for breach of duty. The same corporations that own tobacco also own most of the major food companies and they want to avoid all the law suits and problems that they had with cigarette smoking so they are fighting tooth and nail to protect themselves in anyway they can. They can not offer us any help – they are blocking our access to healthy food and our free choice. Whether they know their food is addicting (like they knew cigarettes were for many years before having to admit it) or not is immaterial – you and I are addicted and we have to make a clean break and eat only whole foods. Here you will see that the need to exercise more and personal responsibility is being pushed by the corporations like McDonalds to blame us, the consumer instead of the corporations. It’s a very interesting book.

I’m eating only whole foods – almost totally vegan. But you can do it as a vegetarian or with meat – but it has to be whole, nothing processed to break the addiction. I’m finding that it works. We have switched to using smaller plates and eating utensils etc. more akin to what our grandparents would have used.

Skylar

It's funny.  I was scanning old photos for my elderly Aunt and I noticed how so many of her mom, my grandmother's sisters looked like my grandmother.  Most were solid, size 18, THICK.  My aunt is 78 and has always been overweight.  Maybe only to 220lbs, but tons of health problems, knee replacements, etc.

My mom on the other side was similar to my grandmother, only tall.  She's mostly healthy, just has muscle nad balance issues.

Basically, I've come from very thick stock.  I see my genetic markers.  But I refuse to NOT make the best of who I am.  I see depression and negativity in my family and try to persue mental health and positivity.  I see weight issues and I pursue fitness.

You can't change genetic disposition, but you can still be your best self.

It does create a dichotomy with others.  In my 2 year journey, I have found I avoid family more because of the meloncholy and negativity.  But I am happy and healthy.

I've been thinking about just this thing and - voila - here's a thread about it.

Genetics plays a part, granted.  For me, though, it's an issue of control.  Overly-critical parents who brooked no talking back or food left on the plate while trying to raise one head-strong kid triggered a rebellion in me so deep that I can't seem to root it out.

My greatest fear is that it (I call her 'she') will kill me, because she doesn't care about me, or what I need.  She insists on being in control and, from pre-memory age, that's manifisted in food.  I've been considering surgery on and off for a few years. My doctor doesn't recommend it until all else has failed.  However, I wonder if, even then, it's a good idea.  It treats my symptom, but can anything cure my illness?

I can't be the only one who feels this way.  Please, I'd like to hear from others.

     Dear TxBelle:  

Where do I begin? Your posting kind  of hit home for me. My parents  weren't overly critical, but they were the ones that said: Do as I say, Not what I do!, You eat when I say it is time to eat, if you are hungry or not,(but when I was hungry, had to wait until it was time.) Had to eat everything on my plate too, other children are going hungry overseas, etc, etc. I do not think I talked back, but I loved(past tense) to argue about everything. I had and still have this saying: Don't ever tell me, what to do, You ask me, and if I can do it, I will do the best I can, but Don't tell me what to do!  I don't know if I got like that, because I came from a family, that liked, to yell a lot and loud. I was told that, I took control, of my life through my overeating, that was one area, of my life, that no one could control , but me. (REBELLION!!)
    Your She and my She must have gone to the same school, My she doesn't pay me any mind either, sometimes I get her to listen, but mostly she does what she wants and ignores me, like the other people in my life do. It is kind of sad funny, that I can see myself doing something I just told myself not to do. It's like I caught myself in the cookie jar, and boldly telling myself I am not doing it. I am still trying to figure out , what  is up with me, why do I do those things? Some times I wish I could think more like men do. ( You got something to do, just do it. what ever it takes, to get the job done. never mind about the other stuff.) You know belle, It's all in our hands, we make it or break it, we need to take control, and kick the she devil to the curb.
     Belle until you get you under control no surgery can help you.( my opinion) With surgery you still have to eat on a program for reduction, you still have to exercise,  you still have to get and keep your head  and emotions in the right place. If you still have to do that, why are you going to spent thousands of dollars, on something that isn't going to change anything, on how your going to lose it.?  To me Surgery is not an opinion, but like your Doctor said: Not until all else has failed. Find out what's eating you, so you can stop eating it. (Oh, I am so good at giving advise, I should listen to myself (ha,ha,ha)) Well, that's my two cents worth.

Twilight